The Old-School Way for Making Money From Your Blog

I like writing postcards. Licking a stamp. Walking to the nearest postbox.

In this time of instant gratification, the postcard’s slow journey adds a sense of value. Unlike clicking the send button to dash off an email.

I’m also an old-fashioned cook.

On Sunday, I made 42 spicy meatballs. For each small meatball, I measured the minced meat in the palm of my hand. I rolled the little ball between my hands until its shape was imperfectly perfect.

42 minutes of meatball meditation.

I’m old-fashioned in numerous ways. I enjoy a romantic dinner—a slow savoring of food and wine, and company. I hate tweeting and whatsapping in between sipping my wine and feasting on my steak.

And I’m building my internet business using these old-fashioned slow-movement principles, too.

1. Generosity

I might be naïve.

But I’ve never worried about sharing my knowledge with you.

If my business was a garden, then my blog posts would be a colorful display of flowers. Lavender, bougainvillea, fuchsias. Mostly in my favorite color (purple of course!). You can walk around this garden and enjoy my flowers. It’s free.

A generous supply of valuable information builds a solid foundation for an online business. Valuable information builds trust and authority, and readers can get to know you and like you.

2. Connection

The internet world talks about people in numbers.

As if we’re faceless pixels.

Marketers and online entrepreneurs scrutinize conversion figures so email lists and sales can be boosted. But they sometimes forget it’s real people getting irritated by popups.

The internet offers a wonderful opportunity to connect with people across the world; but this human connection only happens when we treat people like human beings, not like pixels.

This doesn’t mean we ignore conversion rates and A/B tests, but we must balance numbers with human insight. With a willingness to be good. To be ourselves. To connect.

If my business was a garden, then I’d have benches for you and me to sit on and chat. You’d bring your thermos with coffee, and I’d be slurping my green tea.

3. Personality

The web is overflowing with content.

And we all feel overwhelmed.

As a one-man band or one-woman business, you may feel there’s no place for you. How can you compete with companies and editorial teams producing outstanding content on a conveyor belt? Copyblogger offers a free library of ebooks about content marketing. And have you seen how many free ebooks HubSpot offers on their blog?

But there’s one way you can be different and compete with the biggest companies: Stand out by being more personal. Because everyone is looking for trusted voices to make sense of the frightening avalanche of daily information.

So infuse your content with You. Write with your unique voice. Tell stories about your life. Take time to answer comments and emails.

These days, we “talk” with call center menus. We get canned email responses. We can automate almost everything.

But we crave a human touch.

In my little garden, you know I’ve watered the seedlings, mowed the grass, and it was me, not a robot, chatting with you and laughing at your jokes.

4. Products

I’ve taken the old-school approach to making money from my blog.

And let’s be honest … that’s partly because I didn’t have a clue.

So I started with building an audience, with finding my tribe and learning how I could help.

My tribe—that’s you—told me what services and products to offer. I developed my most recent guide, for instance, after a blog update about writing About pages received my highest ever click through rate. Clearly, this was something you wanted help with.

And here’s one other bit of advice:

In the beginning, your garden may only get a trickle of visitors. At that time, it’s hard to make money from selling apples, strawberries, and peaches. So when your audience is small, hire yourself out as a gardener or garden designer, or develop premium gardening courses.

To make a living from apples, you need to sell a lot of apples. But you’d only need to sell a few premium gardening courses.

Focus on serving your tribe

At business school I was taught to focus on the projects that bring in most money. In my marketing classes I was told how to manipulate prices to determine maximum profit.

But as a solo-gardener, I’ve learned more important lessons.

Design your garden around your personality to attract the right visitors. Spend some time drinking tea and chatting.

Don’t forget to water your seedlings. It can be hard work, but it’s also utterly rewarding.

Reader Interactions

Comments

That’s an awesome piece of advice as always! Old school for sure. But I can totally relate.

And I so agree with the way you have positioned the audience and yourself. The connection is so crucial and it is usually one of the main reasons to be able to make a sale.

I too wonder as to why we are so used to assigning numbers to real people. Of course that’s how we will be able to quantify and measure our efforts. But that doesn’t mean we should forget about the living humans 🙂

Thanks for letting me visit your garden. I value your content and enjoy reading your posts. I signed up for your free writing course a year or so and never got to take it, but have picked up the gist of your ideas through your posts.

You truly have a gift. I ALWAYS take the time to read what you write, because it makes me happy AND it’s so valuable. God bless you and your business. And may He bless me to be able to write just as half as good as you 🙂

Haha, back from a very good holiday, isn’t it? Thats what it read like. Thanks for your good words, and keep up the good work. You realy know how to use words to express the right feeling. Thanks, you made my day.

Thanks. Are those your own drawings ? Great. Solving problems of your clients, your own way is like walking on new territory. Nobody around to tell you how to do that. You get general answers. But nobody has the same clients as you.

You have to follow your gut feeling. Do what you think is right. I like being solo business owner. You can do your own thing and nobody tells you you cant do it. But it is the hardest thing to do. Being your own boss. Playing with guys like Fear, Hope, Courage and Action every day.

Cause Fear tells you you can’t do it. Do like everyone else. Action is sometimes late at work. So you keep in your bed. Courage tells you to get up and do it. And Hope, if he goes PN holliday you are stuck.

So being a solopreneur is about finding out what your passions are and what you want to do with your life and for people.

I love the freedom of running my own business. I won’t claim it’s easy. It’s often hard work and there’s lots of issues to grapple with like fear and self-doubt. But I’d never go back go being employed and working for a boss.

I love meatballs too, Henneke. In fact we had the Indian version (kofta) and rice yesterday for lunch and it had all the love my Mom has for feeding her children and family pets. 🙂

Building a tribe takes time and there are lots of hit and misses but we ultimately attract the right people whom we can serve, even if it never goes beyond downloading goodies in a newsletter. Yet, when we spend time nurturing our people and list, the dividends are reaped later on when what we do really does make a difference to our garden.

Coming from a Cajun background, I’m all about savoring food. Just like half the fun of Christmas is looking forward to the coming holiday, so half the fun of eating is cooking. Only, our meatballs as big as baseballs. 🙂

What a fabulously fun post! I think personality is one of the most charming and powerful assets we own as bloggers. It’s not something we need to research or develop. All we need to to is access it. And I can always count on your posts to show me how.

Thanks so much for focusing me today. I know lots of other writers who want in on this secret. I’m off to share!

Hey coach-in-a-post you’ve done it again! I love that you started with 1. Generosity. (Artisans pass on their knowledge to apprentices) Yes! YEs! YES! There is something richer and deeper in an old school artisan approach to your craft – whatever it may be. It is possible to feel every emotion that went into creating the product or service (the love, the frustration, the worry, the passion); and I believe that people will connect with that. Taking pride and time in honing your craft, respecting your customer by creating bespoke not off-the-shelf for their needs and desires is a journey filled with rewards to be savoured.

So mass produced meatballs from a tin vs. hand crafted freshly made meatballs…Mmm, I know which ones I choose – with a glass of wine and good company.

Thanks Henneke, Funny, I’ve always thought of my blog as a garden. My posts are flowers and sometimes I weed those I think detract from the total look. I find if I travel and leave my blog garden too long, it gets overgrown and neglected. In the end, our blogs should be places we’re proud of and comfortable in. And sometimes, like with gardens, that takes time.

Hi Henneke, Good one. I do follow Hubspot and Copyblogger. Yes, they crank out a ton of content. But, I feel more “connected” when I read your articles. I don’t know… Maybe you are writing without any gobbledygook and speak straight from your heart 🙂 Keep doing the good work. Thanks.

I sometimes feel frightened when I see how much outstanding content companies like HubSpot and Copyblogger produce. But then I remind myself that there’s no need for me to compete. I can do this in my own way.

Dear Henneke, Thank you so much for this post. It is so timely for me, as a friend was commenting on my most recent email newsletter and identified the biggest flaw to be that we were giving away too much information and not promoting ourselves enough throughout the newsletter. It stopped me in my tracks for a moment, and made me question if I were making a big mistake, until I remembered that our intention is to always offer something of value to our customers and sometimes that value is more than just our products but also our expertise and personality. Thank you for validating this belief. We have learned over the years that our customers value just visiting with us and appreciate the stories and experiences we can share with them when they are purchasing our artworks.This is so important to use and makes standing in a gallery all day so worthwhile! It’s the connections that are most important, both to us and our business! Thank you again–you made my day!

Dear Henneke, interesting parallel especially because I have been a gardener for many years and created many happy and healthy gardens. I realized over the years that a garden that is well tended will flourish and look good. It is the same with our relationship with people. If we tend to them they, and our relationship will also flourish. In today’s day of internet marketing we all want to have the viral stuff happen to our posts and our products. We want to be the next person who had a million views in a matter of two days but on the side of reality if we can tend and build our connections with people than we will do well on the long run. In the mean time I hope we can all hire out as gardeners and before we starve to death. Thank you for your wonderful post. I agree with many of your reader’s comments. You do write very well. I truly enjoy your posts.

Green Tea, Hand made Meatballs and a little army of seedlings make a perfect combination. You don’t need 1000 acres of land to grow a really special Garden…you can actually start with a sunny windowsill and plenty of TLC! Thank you for your delightful and motivational posts Henneke. Did you sow any new seeds today? Just asking 🙂

I was having gardening fatigue a while back. The plants are dying despite the best that I’m giving them. I decided to hack it and really I’m bluffing myself. Buying other people plants and presenting as mine. Putting up wayfinders everywhere to my garden when I just need 10 interested visitors and not 1000 random ones.

Along the way I lost myself and why I’m doing this.

Your analogy helped me to think back to why I started.

It’s okay if the garden remain small but it’s something i know is mine and if there is just one person passing by to give compliments, that will be worth the while.

The connection is really the important part and I love the attention you gave to it. But, I love the way you deciphered what product to create by looking at your click-through rate. That’s smart, because it shows that it’s something that people would want to know more information on.

I’m going to have to use that one time. Awesome stuff … love the drawings.

Henneke, your analogy about your business as a garden is fantastic. I am a very visual person, so this is a very nice perspective on it.

Also, i agree about personality. This is how we can compete with the “big ones”. Personally, i do not read HubSpot often for this reason. I think they’re doing great things, but it’s just not for me. The whole site also seems very conversion focused. But they are definitely practicing what they preach, so i get it.

I’d rather read blogs like yours, Demian Farnworth, Adrienne Smith, Neil Patel or Neville Medhora. People with a very human touch, that you can feel connected to. Having your own voice is vital. I always say to myself, it’s better to speak directly to just one person than to nobody!

Everything becomes simple if a voice speaks to us. You no longer have to choose “which” article to read, between the thousands on the subject – if you’ve found the one site that speaks to you like none other does. They might say the same thing, but it won’t feel the same, it won’t read the same, and it won’t stick the same.

Thanks so much for your lovely post and have a great weekend in advance 🙂

Thank you for sharing this post. It reassured me that we are dealing with humans and giving our customers that special personal attention means the world to them….you are 100% right! Sometimes we can get so carried away with all the tools that are offered for the online world. It can become so overwhelming and doing things the old fashioned way makes us feel human!

Hello Matthew – thank you for stopping by! Yes, it’s easy to feel defeated when we see how much good content others produce, but when we’re personal, we’re competing in a market of one, and we can do what we’re doing best – being ourselves. 🙂

Hi Henneke, These tips are what can build an empire out of your blog. Everything is so essential and I must say very powerful.

Humanification is what we crave for these days and you are right a personality can boost your business by making you stand out of the crowd. This is the advice I was given a couple of weeks ago by you. But can you pleaasee share some tips on how to do it.

I would request you to write a post on it (personality injection to blog). Thanks a ton 🙂

Out of all the points the mentioned, Personality is my favourite. This is one of the most neglected things by startup bloggers. It is very necessary to use a conversational tone in your posts and make your readers feel that this content is from a human being that is addressing them.

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About Henneke

I never saw myself as a writer, but in my early forties, I learned how to write and discovered the joy of writing. Now, I’d like to empower you to find your voice, share your ideas and inspire your audience.Learn how I can help you